In Sexuality Reimagined: MSM in Modern India (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023), Shalija Tandon examines the question of how a sexual subject becomes a political subject, situates its work in the framework of subaltern politics but takes the concept further, adds to the debate on the increasing need to understand how the sexual subject becomes the political subject.
The book is divided into six different chapters and examines how medical knowledge is produced around bodies that do not fit in the heteronormative framework of the state’s rationale and processes. The marginal bodies studied in this research are termed MSM, men who have sex with men, categorized as a high-risk group in the backdrop of HIV/AIDS. These queer bodies entered the registers of epidemiology and governmentality.
The book interrogates and asks how a sexual subject becomes a political question. To answer this political trajectory, the book analyses the category of risk in biomedicine. It investigates how the category of risk becomes critical to the Indian state’s rationale and policies wherein, through the ambit of health and population, sexuality is managed. Unearthing the sexual politics in South Asia, the book, based on rich empirical evidence derived from the lived experiences of MSM, narrates the construction of sexual subjectivity and masculinity. The process of construction occurs in negotiation with the Indian state, bringing forth the dimension of the Indian state as a medico-legal governmentality regime and how MSM takes on the identity of a medicalized subject.
The first chapter Locating the Political in Sexuality, poses some important questions. Are we naturally endowed with the characteristics to be masculine or feminine? Do we know from birth that to become a man or woman, there are specific attributes or characteristics that one has to perform to fit into the societal sensibility of being a man?
In the second chapter the author talks about sexuality, feminism, and queer theory, In India, social justice is loaded with political and social arguments about ascribed identities such as caste, class, gender, language, and religion. Amidst all this, social justice has largely failed to voice the concerns of sexuality.
The third chapter deals with homosexuality, law and medicine. The colonial historiography in scholarly writings has focused on the macro-sites of politics and arrangements of power. The focus has been on trade, commerce, law, the army, revolts, colonial patriarchy, colonial reformist approach and policies, and the colonial state. All these aspects presented history as a linear expression of events and the sole authority on what constituted history.
In the fourth chapter the author talks about sexuality and state in modern India, the discourse on homosexuality that emerged and endured in colonial and postcolonial India makes it apparent how, historically, same-sex relationships arose and got moulded in the political and social domains.
The fifth chapter – The State and Risky Subjects, deals with homosexuality in modern India -which is considered a sin and a Western import that corrupts the morals and character of men in general and youth in particular. Homosexuality in India entails stigma, harassment, discrimination, exploitation, and violence. The understanding implicit in contemporary Indian society is that it is unnatural, antithetical to the traditions, and customs of the society, a disease but curable, an anomaly which needs to be corrected and primarily has come from videsh (foreign) with its soap operas, jeans, junk food, and immoral western culture.
In the last chapter Queer Community: Disjuncture Between Political and Politics?, the author talks about sexuality as an essentially contested concept. In Western political theory, the idea has provided fertile ground on which several theoretical strands such as sexology, feminism (there are various perspectives in feminism, each offering their notion of sexuality informed by their theoretical and practical experiences), and queer theory (similarly has different standpoints based on theoretical and practical differences). Theorists such as Michael Foucault, Judith Butler, and Simone De Beauvoir have produced seminal works which have been influential in providing vital entry points in the study of sexuality. In the Indian context, studies on sexualities, even those grounded in ethnographic research to understand local sensitivities and sensibilities, must refer to and engage with Western ideas on the subject.
The book will be useful for students and act as a methodological guide in social sciences and gender studies.
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Nupur Pattanaik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Central University of Odisha.